Friday, June 22, 2007

Mass Grave Unearthed in Ukraine

With the discovery of a mass grave believed to contain the remains of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis, angry Ukrainian Jewish leaders are demanding that their country come clean.

"During the Soviet era, Ukrainian authorities did not tell the truth about the real number of Holocaust victims" in Ukraine, declared Mikhail Frenkel, head of the Association of Jewish Media in Ukraine. "Today, some local authorities are still trying to conceal the numbers."

Ukrainian officials insist that isn't the case.

"The situation is a rudiment of Soviet mentality and stereotypes," said Vasily Gazhaman of the Ukrainian State Committee on Religions and Nationalities.

Some Jewish leaders are insisting that the grisly discovery in the southern village of Gvozdavka be used to teach greater sensitivity regarding the massacre of Jews during the Holocaust, as well as to encourage tolerance to younger Ukrainians.

About 1.5 million Jews are believed to have been killed in Ukraine during World War II.

Meanwhile, a grave believed to contain the remains of dozens of Jews killed by the Nazis was found in western Ukraine. Along with the remains of at least 60 people, workers digging at the site of a future office complex near Netishin, a town in the Khmelnitzky Region, also found what resembled Torah-scroll fragments.

"Torah fragments suggest that probably this was a massacre of Jews killed in 1942," acknowledged Valeriy Malkin, deputy head of the Khmelnitzky regional state administration. Local authorities assigned a special commission to investigate the case.

The Gvozdavka grave was found last month when workers were preparing to lay gas pipelines in the village about 100 miles from Odessa, said Roman Shvartzman, head of the Odessa Regional Association of Jewish Prisoners of Ghettos and Concentration Camps.

Residents of Gvozdavka, in the Lyubashivsky District, confirmed that their village contained a ghetto during World War II, and that Romanian and German Nazis brought Jews there from Moldova, as well as from the areas of Odessa and Zhitomir.

Shvartzman said the Romanians and local collaborators established a concentration camp near the village that was active between November 1941 and March 1942. About 5,000 of the camp's predominantly Jewish prisoners were murdered. More died from starvation and disease.

'Authorities Were Silent' But according to Shvartzman, despite the scale of the operation, local residents "forgot about the tragedy," and Jews after the war were unable to establish where the victims were buried.

Iliya Levitas, a Holocaust expert and a veteran leader of the Jewish community of Ukraine, said that he was not surprised by the recent find. He also blamed the local population for not disclosing the news after the war.

"The locals knew about the tragedy and the massacre but did nothing, and local authorities were also silent," he said. "Only due to the pipeline construction did we learn about the site."

Jewish leaders and some non-Jewish Ukrainian public figures successfully appealed to the authorities to halt construction and investigate the wartime tragedy.

"When the workers found the remains, I gave an order to stop the construction and set up a commission right away," stated Anatoly Ostrovsky, a Lyubashivsky District official. "Thanks to me, this case received publicity."

Rabbi Avraham Wolf of Odessa, a Chabad Lubavitch rabbi, noted that the Jewish community has asked local authorities for ownership rights to the land that contains the remains, so the victims can be buried according to Jewish tradition and a monument erected in their memory.

Jewish leaders and Holocaust researchers believe there are 350 to 700 mass graves of Holocaust victims in Ukraine that remain undiscovered.

Shvartzman estimates that about 240,000 Jews were killed in the region of Odessa, but only the names of 93 Jews murdered at the Gvozdavka site are known.